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“Yes, my queen? What is it?” As he stood, quiet and unmoved, she realized that there was nothing he could say. She couldn’t let him see her suffering. She was no longer a child begging for her tutor’s affection.

“A small matter,” she answered stiffly. “Have someone keep an eye on Nereus.”

“Nereus?” the eunuch echoed. That had caught his interest. “Any particular reason?”

“Not in the slightest. I merely don’t like the look of the man.” She swallowed. The eunuch had his secrets; she should keep hers too.

“As you command, my queen.”

That night, Berenice asked Leda to send the copper-faced maid, that child of the Upper Lands, to dress her for bed. As she waited, Berenice ran a comb through her hair. Its ivory teeth caught on a tangle. She jerked hard against the knot.

“My queen,” her maid cried out from the threshold. “Let me. Your hands are made for finer things than combs.”

The girl’s fingers were deft. Berenice barely felt the biting teeth spinning her hair into smooth spools.

“Where did you learn such artistry?” Berenice applied the compliment with care. The maid had offered much, more surely than her advisers did, but Berenice still couldn’t say why it was she trusted her.

“I learned many skills in Thebes. How to twist hair, how to speak your tongue, how to please men.”

“And how to kill?” Berenice’s voice barely scratched above a whisper.

“Yes, that too,” the maid said as she twisted the comb through her tangles. “The priestesses schooled us in all ancient arts.”

Berenice had ordered men dead a hundred times in those heady days after she claimed the throne, but this was different. Time ticked by, relentless. If news spread of her father’s defeat in Rome, the suspicion would fall all the more heavily on her. “It must happen tonight.”

The girl’s eyes widened, but she didn’t object. “And so it will, my queen.”

“Wake me when it’s done.”

She needn’t have asked to be roused. Sleep refused to come to her that night, though she was alone, untroubled by her ill-fated husband. She nearly wished that Seleucus would enter, that she might do the deed herself. She, too, could find the strength—she didn’t need a slave to carry out her killings. She wasn’t soft. But it would be reckless for him to die in her bed. A thousand more suspicions thrown her way.

Every noise she mistook for footfalls, and each time the ghost steps echoed in her ear, she shot straight up in bed. But they came to nothing. The moon rose—and the maid did not return.

Perhaps the girl had lied. Perhaps she’d no intention of taking a knife to Seleucus’s throat. Perhaps she was Seleucus’s spy. Berenice had been a fool to trust her. How often her mother had warned her against such credulity—and here she was, asking some cretin of the Upper Lands to commit her murders.

Berenice slipped from her bed. She cast aside the curtains and breathed in the night sea. The moon was but a sliver over Pharos’s gleaming beacon. At times, the lighthouse threatened the very stars. She wondered if the gods grew jealous, if they planned one day to tear it down and curse the foolish men who challenged nature’s grandeur.

“My queen.”

She spun around to face her servant. For all her pained listening, she hadn’t heard the girl’s approach. Wreathed in lamplight, the maid looked more spirit than flesh. There was something otherworldly about her, standing there half dressed, her pupils alive with flame.

“It is done,” the maid whispered.

Berenice waited for her heart to steady. It was over: Seleucus was dead. His hands could not touch her now, and she would reign in peace. All the relief she’d longed for evaporated. Not even a taste. Only another wave of emptiness, another life excised from her own. Perhaps that was what it meant to rule: to cut away one tie after another. Her father, her mother, her husband. All natural affiliations obliterated.

“Take me to him.” Suddenly, Berenice needed to see him. She’d sent someone else to kill him, but she should bear witness to the destruction she’d uttered.

“My queen.” The girl crossed to her. “It’s not wise—”

“I decide what’s wise.” Wisdom didn’t dictate her decision here. Not even power, nor politics. Her softness drew her to the dead man. It was as relentless as the drive that called a pigeon home.

The girl’s eyes grew large. Then she nodded. “Of course, my queen. We should take the servants’ corridor. It will be safer.”

Safer.
How strange to picture herself hiding from her own guards. But Berenice meekly acquiesced and followed the maid out of her bedchamber, passing through the dark corridor that led toward her father’s private banquet hall. She’d scarcely ventured into the space since she’d taken possession of her father’s apartments, and it felt odd to see it now, precisely as the Piper had left it.

Though smaller than the dining rooms that flanked the palace’s great courtyard, this hall was far more lavish. Not only the tables but the frames of the dining couches were cut from solid gold, and each divan was softened with thick cushions shrouded in red Chinese silk. Whereas the other rooms were merely painted, deep friezes had been cut into the chamber’s marble walls, scenes of goat-legged Pan, his horns and beard flaked with gold, playing his flute and chasing maidens, his arms and cock outstretched. Berenice had heard rumors, of course, of the other sort of business that her father had indulged in. Her stomach twisted to think of the drink and sex that had no doubt filled this room. She felt a welcome flood of relief when her guide pulled on a clutch of grapes hanging on the far wall. A well-disguised door creaked open to reveal a servants’ entryway.

The staircase they descended was narrow and drab, all the more so for its nearness to her father’s luxuries. Even the smells were of a different nature, as though the incense and perfumes that laced the air in the king’s apartments couldn’t permeate the divide between the royals and their slaves. The light from her maid’s lamp was so dim that Berenice had to run her fingers along the wall to guide her steps. If she should fall and cry out—nothing would implicate her more than being discovered here, sneaking through the back corridors with a serving girl.

When at last they stumbled into her husband’s rooms, Berenice felt the blood throbbing in her throat as though it meant to burst the vessels that bound it. She took a deep breath and, shrugging the maid’s warning hand from her shoulder, stepped into Seleucus’s bedchamber. Within, his body lay bathed in Selene’s ghost light. Berenice approached, her feet bare and silent on the onyx floor.

His form was warm, as though life still lingered in his veins. Her finger traced the purple bruise around his neck, residue from the silken scarf that had stopped his breath. The bedclothes reeked of sweat and shit and sex.

A palm clasped over her nose and mouth, Berenice used her free hand to peel away the soiled sheets. The arms that had once pinned her to her place lay limp. His cock was no mighty weapon now, a pink and meaty worm drooping from his groin. Soon his body would be cleaned and clothed in fineries, stench and soil scrubbed from his skin, all evidence of life erased. She’d seen her mother’s corpse transformed that way. At burial, Tryphaena was reborn a demented deity—a father-loving, brother-loving goddess, her face caked in kohl and ruby, her limbs pumped with immortal bile, her body decked in gold and turquoise and lapis lazuli. Humanity wiped clean.

But not here. Seleucus’s eyes stared blankly upward, empty of the vigor that had marked them in life. He was a man, and he was mortal. And now he was dead. No subterfuge to mask his end. Berenice leaned forward and gently placed a finger on each of his eyelids, pulling them shut. That was better; he looked almost peaceful. If she ignored the smell, she might even imagine that he slept. Some keening part of her, deep in the pit of her stomach, yearned for his love. Unbidden, her left hand had come to rest on her belly; even now her womb might quicken with his seed. Leda would know ways to rid a woman of an unwanted child. Berenice didn’t wish to bear a dead man’s son, but as she looked at his face now, it saddened her to think that no child would ever reflect its contours.

The maid’s gentle hand pressed hers. Berenice didn’t look up; her fingers lingered on his sharp cheekbones, his parched lips, the small cleft in his chin. To peel away her gaze would be to admit her guilt.
Never show them you are soft.

“We should leave him now, my queen.”

Berenice swallowed her nostalgia. No one—not even her parents, who’d been compelled to do so by blood—had ever loved her. It was foolish to have expected her husband to be any different. There was something deep inside her that made her impossible to love. It was the same quality that made her strong. Their bodies had come together, nothing more—a paltry imitation of closeness. Love and beauty were for concubines. He’d surely begotten many a kid upon many a whore, and once winter had come and gone, she’d scarcely be able to walk ten paces without setting eyes on some brat who shared his father’s dimpled cheek.

She glanced up from Seleucus’s corpse and drank in the maid’s beauty: her lush hair, her rising breasts, the glowing copper of her skin. How many times had her husband taken this creature to his bed? What a thrill for him, that she’d come to him willingly this once. How eager he must have been to spill his seed into her cunt. Seleucus took what he liked; she could no longer begrudge him that. Berenice smiled. Two women hovering over the body of a false lover: did the gods know a staler tale?

“My queen, you shouldn’t be found beside his corpse.”

Berenice said nothing. The artifice grew feeble in the fading night. It would be no secret who’d ordered her husband’s death. All of Alexandria would know the truth by dawn, though the wiser ones would deny it. Seleucus’s dying moments strung out before her eyes: moans coalescing into desperate gasps as the beauty tightened the deceitful silk about his throat. Such dainty hands. They didn’t look as though they had the strength for murder.

Those same hands urged Berenice to her feet, and she bid a silent farewell to his wasted form. He would not overcome the nighttime trials to take his place among the gods; he’d drift aimless, useless in the undergloom. A common fate for a common life.

“There’s so much death.”

“There is, my queen, but no more or less than there has ever been. Bloody gods birth bloody creatures.”

Berenice nodded at these words. They even passed for wisdom. At least in her experience, life was filled with only blood and fury. And if the gods were to blame—well, then her mother would be contented in the afterlife.

“Who will tend to him?” She’d see that gentle hands bathed his form—she owed him that little. He’d given her his seed and his soldiers, though the first she would cast out.

“I can prepare the body, my queen, if it pleases you. But first you must return to your chambers.”

Berenice let the maid guide her through the darkened corridors once more. Leda did not wake at the creaking of the first door, nor did she stir as the pair crept through the antechamber. The old nurse’s breathing stalled as Berenice pushed open the door to her bedchamber, but soon her snores returned.

Inside, the girl lit a lantern, her eyes washed crimson in the glow, and her fingers trembled. These shaking hands untied Berenice’s chiton, unwrapped its loosened folds, and then slipped a fresh tunic over her head.

The maid seemed rattled, more so than before. “What frightens you?” Berenice asked.

“Me?” the maid replied. “Nothing on this earth.”

“Then why do you tremble?”

The girl took a deep breath, gulping up so much air that Berenice wondered how such a small body could contain it.

“It’s weary work to take a life.” She paused and considered her mistress with consuming eyes. Dark irises floated in milky whites, and Berenice recalled an old tale warning against such features.
Don’t trust eyes adrift in ivory.
“But I’m glad to do so in the service of my queen.”

“Did you care for him?” Berenice knew she could have asked the same question of herself—why else did her mind turn to thoughts of sons that she might have borne? Had she longed for that, as her mother had, no matter the cost?

“You mean because I lay with him?” The girl turned the question against her. “Not once, but many times?”

Berenice could have sworn she caught a hint of amusement in the maid’s firelit pupils.

“No, I didn’t care for him. He wished to lie with me. It was easier to agree. And I thought in time it might prove useful.”

“And so it did.” Berenice allowed herself a smile. The girl was clever, cleverer even than she’d suspected. “What’s your name? I’ve never heard the servants call you anything but the beauty of Upper Egypt.”

“My name is not Berenice nor Arsinoe nor Cleopatra.” She answered softly. “So it can be of little importance to anyone. But you may call me Merytmut, if it pleases you.”

“Merytmut,” Berenice repeated. Merytmut—beloved of the mother goddess, in the girl’s stranger tongue. She knew the power of giving names and choosing them. “What brings you to Alexandria?”

“You take an unusual interest in your servants.”

“Most of my servants don’t share your skills.”

“I told you: I learned my skills in Thebes,” the girl rejoined quietly. “And everyone in the palace knows I am from the Upper Lands. There they find me ordinary enough. Perhaps someday you might linger in the southern kingdom, as you’ve grown to admire its people so.”